Hillsdale students will register for spring courses this month with a new system that replaced WebAdvisor, which the college had used since 2007.

Self-Service will improve on the old application by preventing crashes as students enroll for next semester’s courses, according to Registrar Douglas McArthur. The new system will also allow students to see which classes they successfully registered for on the same page. 

“You’ll know immediately which classes you got because you’ll be on the same screen if you press the registration button. It will tell you what went through and what didn’t on that exact same screen,” McArthur said. “On the old system, students had to log back in again, and all of that delay was problematic.”

Self-Service will help to combat a system overload by restricting the number of sessions that students are allowed to have open with different class options. This means students will have to manually enter alternative classes if their initial course requests are not accepted, McArthur said.

“WebAdvisor allowed students to have multiple sessions open with different schedules,” McArthur said. “The unfortunate thing is that this increased the number of students that were registering at the same time. WebAdvisor never actually went down, but it definitely got gummed-up.”

Junior Lydia Hilton said WebAdvisor has crashed on her computer each time she has registered for classes.

“The new system will be more efficient and easier for students to understand and navigate,” Hilton said.

In preparation for the new system, training sessions will be available to students on Canvas, in person, or through resident assistants.

“The training means that if residents are struggling with registration, there are people in their dorms who can help them,” Hilton said. “Not everyone would have to flood Career Services with registration questions.” 

Career Services is offering more registration training sessions this year than usual, according to McArthur.

The new system allows students to locate classes, filter them under the “Student Planning” tab, and add them to their carts.

“On WebAdvisor, it was hard to search for things,” Hilton said. 

“On Self-Service, you can search by professor, by time, by semester, and by subject. There are so many more options for filtering your search results.”

Self-Service will also allow students to learn which classes they successfully registered for more quickly. Because WebAdvisor crashed, confirmation for classes was often delayed, and students had to open multiple tabs to find out what classes they got, according to junior Ann Brooks. 

“The old registration system was very stressful because you had to wait to see whether your class requests went through for 15 minutes,” Brooks said.

Some students said they believe a new system is unnecessary.

“I was not unhappy with the old system,” Brooks said. “It’s not like a faster registration system will help you get into any more classes, so there’s not a huge difference.”

Even with the change to Self-Service, Hilton said registration will still be stressful for students. 

“There will always be a little bit of anxiety with registration because everyone has to register,” Hilton said. “That’s something we all have in common.”